1. The Battle of Oaxaca in the Context of Mexico’s Post-Electoral Crisis

by Nancy
Davies

[This is a slightly edited version of the author’s
commentary from Oaxaca
on August26, 2006. For the original see the web site www.narconews.com ]

Note: This is the
first of several accompanying articles and news reports, below, about the
situation in Mexico.
Further on, we reproduce articles from Socialist Action newspaper (in
particular, one by a fraternal organization in Mexico, the Liga
de UnidadSocialista, or
Socialist Unity League); from Intercontinental Press, the online publication of
the Fourth International; from the web sites of Z magazine and CounterPunch; and especially from the web site of Narco News, which has provided detailed reports on events
in Oaxaca and on the Zapatista “Other Campaign” since that campaign began in
January this year.

Major social upheavals have been
occurring for most of this year in Mexico, a country of nearly 110 million
people, a “Third World” country, a country of extreme poverty alongside extreme
wealth, the Latin American country that borders the imperial heartland of the
United States at a moment in history when much of Latin America is in revolt
against more than a century of U.S. corporate domination; a country from which
in the nineteenth century the U.S. rulers stole vast territories—which are now
the states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, and most of Utah, Nevada,and Colorado, even part of Wyoming—with the
result that Mexican Americans are the second largest minority in the U.S. (many
of whom say, “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us”); a country
from which millions of people have been forced to migrate to the U.S., with or
without official documents, for the sake of economic survival, especially as a
result of the disaster caused to the Mexican economy by the so-called North
American “Free Trade” Agreement (NAFTA), which by favoring U.S. corporations,
especially U.S. corporate agribusiness, with its huge exports of cheap,
subsidized corn and beans to Mexico, has destroyed the livelihoods and
disrupted the lives of hundreds of thousands of Mexican workers and small
farmers; a country whose sons and daughters now have built, together with other
Latinos and with migrants from many other countries, an unprecedented mass
movement of immigrant workers, which has emerged with great force in the U.S.
in 2006.

Mexico is a country
where several different social struggles and political movements are occurring
simultaneously, with the potential that they could combine with redoubled
intensity into a force challenging the foundations of the social system.
Strikes in the mining and steel industries have been going on for most of 2006,
centering on a fight for union autonomy against a government attempt to impose
a hand-picked leadership on the union of miners and steel workers. A teachers
strike in the state of Oaxaca since June has won the support of the majority of
the Oaxacan population: a People’s Assembly of the
Community of Oaxaca (APPO, in its Spanish initials) has arisen, representing
nearly four hundred organizations, including the teachers union, the health
workers union, and other unions, along with numerous social organizations, especially
of the indigenous peoples who constitute the majority in Oaxaca. Since June
this Popular Assembly has taken over the capital city of Oaxaca and has been
exercising some governmental functions, while demanding the resignation of the
fraudulently elected state governor and calling for a constitutional convention
to refound the state of Oaxaca on a new basis; the
APPO is currently facing “paramilitary,” death-squad-type attacks, as described
in the first two of the articles in this series.

In addition, ever since January 2006
the Zapatistas of the EZLN, based among the Mayan peoples of the state of
Chiapas (which borders Oaxaca—the two states are the southernmost states of
Mexico) have been waging their “Other Campaign,” a campaign reaching out to
every state of Mexico, from south to north, to organize “from below and from
the left” for fundamental change rather than just to engage in electoral
politics. See the accompanying article from the web site www.zmag.com for a detailed and valuable
account of the course of the Other Campaign, whose supporters were subjected to
massive police attack in May in and near the town of Atenco,
on the outskirts of Mexico City.

Of course the main political struggle
that the U.S.
corporate media have focused on has been the electoral campaign of the
reformist capitalist politician, Andrés Manuel LópezObrador (nicknamed AMLO),
presidential candidate of the PRD (Party of Democratic Revolution). The
electoral fraud that occurred around the voting on July 2 has ignited massive
social protest. The Mexican authorities have refused to carry out a complete
recount, “vote by vote, ballot box by ballot box,” as demanded by the hundreds
of thousands of protesters who have occupied parts of Mexico City and engaged
in protest actions all over the country. Much evidence has been presented that
the vote-counting was manipulated to favor the U.S.-backed candidate, Felipe Calderón of the National Action Party (PAN, in its Spanish
initials).

It has been rightly noted that the
Mexican revolution of 1910 began at a time of protests against fraudulent
elections, in the midst of labor battles and peasant revolts. Today, in 2006,
nearly a century after the beginning of the uncompleted Mexican revolution, the
current combination of social and political struggles, as many have already
observed, could unfold into a fundamental revolutionary challenge to the
system, going beyond mere electoral politics.

Because these
developments are of vital importance to working class people in the U.S., we call special attention to this group of
articles on the events in Mexico.]

Andrés Manuel LópezObrador (AMLO) announced the forthcoming Mexican
revolution, on the front page of La Jornada of
August 24, 2006. He said that as of September 12 there will be two presidents
of Mexico.
On TV local channel 11 last night, he amended that to September 16. A small detail. It’s on…

…Unless the Electoral Commission
unexpectedly decides to somehow avert the chaos sure to result if Felipe Calderón is crowned. How about if the court annuls 4,000
precincts and declares AMLO the winner?

I never wanted to be a war
correspondent when I grew up.

Here in Oaxaca, dirty war already
cruises the streets, and it is due only to the non-violent posture of the Popular
Assembly of the People of Oaxaca (APPO in its Spanish initials) that the death
toll remains relatively low.

But the list of dead, wounded,
abducted, and disappeared grows daily, aided by a website called Oaxaca en paz
(“Oaxaca in
Peace,” operated with government support, according to claims by the APPO)
advising free-lance killers who to shoot and where to locate them — a hit list.

The latest death is APPO adherent
Lorenzo San Pablo Cervantes, a 52-year-old public works employee, murdered
August 22 in another pre-dawn incursion by government thugs against the radio
stations captured by the movement. A means to broadcast authentic information
is essential, and both sides know it.

Today in central Oaxaca I can find two commercial stations
still functioning with the voices of the movement — down from ten. Both of them
are located in better sections of the city — ORO (1120 AM) near the government
clinic in central city, and La Ley (710 AM.) in ColoniaReforma. La Ley was the site of the murder of San Pablo Cervantes, who
was guarding the street when he was shot. Radio Plantón
98.1 FM is still broadcasting. A young friend from the movement tells me there
are actually five operating (three inside the one ORO station — but I can’t
pick up their signals.)

The MO of the government is to use
plainclothes, heavily-armed men who roam in vans and shoot their way into radio
facilities; they kill the machinery as well as whomever stands in the way. The
MO of the movement has evolved to include bus-blockades at every important
intersection, to protect both the remaining radio stations and the lives of
important APPO figures, both men and women. Neighborhoods organize to defend
their sections, with heaps of stones stockpiled behind the thrown-up barriers
of bedsprings, wood, rocks, wheels, etc.

By day, one could almost believe
that nothing, as the “ex-governor” Ulises Ruiz Ortiz
(“URO”) says, is going on — until you see the buses crossways on the streets,
the uncollected garbage heaped on the corners, the shutters on certain shops
and restaurants, and an eerie lack of traffic.

Our newest source of information
would like to have a nom de guerre so I’ll call him Pedro. He’s a Zapotec, from the community of San Miguel Alvaredez in the Sierra Norte, and he belongs to a student
organization in Oaxaca
called Gresetec — students from the technological
university. He’s a good-looking young man (in my elderly female opinion) with
straight black hair and skin the color one often sees in Oaxaca — dark honey.

“The most serious problem is
misinformation,” Pedro said, referring to the multiple problems faced by the
social movement. The youngsters have established certain ways to share
information, but Pedro knows that a large part of the state’s population doesn’t
listen to the radio — haven’t got one, or have no interest in remote events, or
are passive. But since the situation is serious, APPO is disseminating
information every which way it can, including to Europe and the U.S. through the web, and with phone calls to
people in Oaxaca.
The cell phone is a major weapon in this war, used to call each station and
encampment, to collect and disseminate news.

In Pedro’s opinion, the only
solution possible is for URO to resign.

According to Pedro and many others,
URO doesn’t live in Oaxaca anyway, he’s only
here three days a week, and his other four days are in Mexico City. Truly, without Pedro to prompt
me, I can say decisively that URO just doesn’t get it, doesn’t know diddly about Oaxacaprofundo or its people. He wanted to clean out the zocalo of the only features that made it interesting:
indigenous vendors, protest marches, and encampments in front of the state
government palace (made over into a museum, then shot up by the police on June
14, then the symbolic seat of the APPO government, and now a stone hulk draped
with banners) and oh, yes, the heavy bell on top to ring for alarms. URO wanted
it pretty for the well-promoted tourist trade.

The U.S.
consul in Oaxaca predicts that the U.S. travel advisory warning coming out this
week will suggest Americans bound for Mexico should go elsewhere.

“Is it better, “
asks Pedro, “for the tourists to see reality, or is it better for them
to not come? Tourists believe what they see on TV.”

The governor, Pedro continues,
imposes his will and defends the interests of capitalism and socialism, both of
which may have their theoretical good points, but neither of which has a role
here in Oaxaca.
“The Mexican revolution never arrived here in the south”. And then he adds, “the group (Gresetec) has adopted
more or less the social philosophy of CésarChávez. No ideology. Everything for
peace.”

Hey, you mean Hugo Chávez of Venezuela?
No. He means CésarChávez,
leader and hero of the United Farm Workers movement in the U.S.

The PRI government has promoted a
lot of internecine killing; territorial boundaries for decades have been
manipulated to set off one group against another, and land ownership, which
should have remained communal, was undercut by Carlos Salinas de Gortari’sneoliberal amendment to
the Mexican Constitution, allowing privatization. Oaxaca is largely rural; Oaxaqueños
refer to themselves as “people of the corn”.

“But this social and teachers’
movement is pacific,” says Pedro. “The theory that the people
are sovereign — he (URO) doesn’t understand that. There’s no
reciprocity. The government knows only violence. He aids his capitalist
friends.”

A sore issue is Plan PueblaPanama, which would affect nine
states. It is opposed by the indigenous people whose lands and lives would be
destroyed by the super-superhighway and industrial and commercial development
alongside it. There would be no benefit for them; low-paid labor in factories
cannot compensate for siphoning off natural resources, polluting the southern
coastal waters, and pushing people off their land. As one person said to me, we
can have development without self-destruction.

Designating the local community as
the decision-maker for future development will be written into a new Oaxaca constitution, as presented to the National Forum
on Constructing Democracy and Governability in Oaxaca, which took place
August 16-17. Why a national forum?

And I haven’t heard anybody connect
the dots on this one: if the Oaxaca teachers
achieve “re-zonification” in their request for a pay
increase, that re-zonification would affect the labor
costs for Plan PueblaPanama
as well — it’s a minimum wage increase across the board by geographical zone,
not just for teachers.

Before URO’s
inauguration he pledged development, progress, and peace with no more protest
marches. What a campaign pledge. “He believed that indigenous ignorance would
protect him. He made a ‘Social Pact’ with many municipalities that he would
give them what they need (cement, roads, food) as long as they let him (URO) go
ahead. Then the repression began, because some would not agree. Political
prisoners — three in the Sierra Norte who would not sign on — now forty-five in
number, nine dead, thirty disappeared. Did you see the
web site Oaxaca
en Paz? It names people as criminals, to be grabbed and killed.”

URO practices selective repression.
That leads to redoubled organization, to an extent which appears almost
miraculous, like a tree full grown overnight.

But there is another side. “Unfortunately,
many people speak in favor of the government, without knowing what it means for
indigenous people,” Pedro stated. Oaxaca
is 70 percent indigenous. Many guys like Pedro speak Zapotec
or some other indigenous language as their mother tongue. “Things are getting
worse — the last two nights — now it’s like a curfew. We are trying to put out
the truth but we are attacked.”

That’s the truth.

The second big truth is that plans
are going forward to support the national “revolution” — whatever form that may take. With “two presidents,” AMLO may find his
firmest base in the south. I was chatting with my pediatrician yesterday (he
also does gerontology) and asked him flat out if he thought a civil war might
come to pass. This guy is moderate in his views, a doctor with youngsters
attending private universities. And he answered yes.

In my personal poll of “unimportant”
persons, that view was repeated by several people, including members of APPO.
There’s a lot of nervous anxiety, especially because of repeated reports of
troops and further attacks. APPO’s official take on
it, reported on the radio, is that everything now depends on how the feds
respond to the contradictions in Oaxaca, not least of which is APPO
simultaneously asking for and rejecting federal intervention — to take out URO,
to take out the federal military, to agree to the removal of URO before any
negotiation can take place, and anyway, who can negotiate? Not URO, he’s the “ex.”
That leaves the Secretary of Government (or Secretary of the Interior, if you
prefer the U.S. analogy),
Carlos AbascálCarranza,
arriving in Oaxaca to talk with the former
bishop of Chiapas,
Samuel Ruiz. Whoops, that’s over. No mediation group can take on the task; it’s
impossible. Okay, APPO will talk to the Department of the Interior directly.

APPO has reiterated dozens of times
that until URO is out, there’s nothing to discuss. The social/teachers’
movement glues itself together on that bottom line, putting authoritarianism on
the chopping block, and recognizing the will of the people as sovereign.

What will it take on the national
stage, to make clear Oaxaca’s
position and its ability to stand by it? If the electoral tribunal incites the
national uproar by designating Calderón president,
AMLO will declare himself president too, on September
16, Independence Day.

What scale of civil disobedience
will that bring?

2. Operation “Clean-Up” in Oaxaca

This article has a remarkable subtitle, which goes
like this:

Following the CIA’s “Psychological Operations” Manual
for the Nicaraguan Contras, the OaxacaState Government Has
Unleashed a Bloody Counterinsurgency Strategy to Eliminate the Social Movement

To
read the full text and see the paramilitary thugs of this “counterinsurgency”
caught in the lights from camera flash bulbs, go to:

by the Socialist Unity League (August 2006 issue of the U.S. newspaper Socialist Action)

Massive protests have been continuing in Mexico against the faked election
of the rightist candidate for president, Felipe Calderon of the PAN (National
Action Party). Organizers estimated the demonstration in Mexico City at the end of July at 2 million
persons, many of whom are still camping out in the city.

Electoral fraud has been a
conspicuous feature of Mexican bourgeois politics since the decline in the
support of the long-ruling PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) became
manifest. In 1988, the PRI obviously stole the election from Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, who ran in the name of the party’s
populist traditions, opposing its turn to neoliberalism.
In the recent presidential election, the PRI candidate ran a distant third,
revealing how discredited the traditional ruling party has become.

The author, aveteran revolutionary socialist in Britain, writes for the UK publication Socialist
Resistance. This is an edited version of his article; the original may be
found here.

Mexico has witnessed bitter
struggles over the summer culminating in the electoral fraud which robbed the
center-left PRD of the presidency. The material for further social explosions
is everywhere.

On August 26, Mexican President
Vicente Fox sent 800 federal riot police with armored cars to guard the
parliament building in Mexico City,
against the possibility of attack by the tens of thousands of protesters
occupying the center of the city in a semi-permanent encampment. The protesters
are demonstrating against the giant fraud in July’s presidential election,
which robbed center-left candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador
(popularly known as ‘AMLO’) of victory, and handed the presidency instead to
right-winger Felipe Calderón, candidate of Fox’s
National Action Party (PAN).

This summer has witnessed a series
of harsh struggles and street battles as the outgoing government of Vicente Fox
sought to stem the rising tide of social protest—using the traditional methods
of the Mexican elite—repression and electoral fraud on a grand scale.

Teachers Rally in Oaxaca

While the protests are currently
centered on the electoral fraud, over the summer there have been several other
key battles—a mass movement in the state of Oaxaca to bring down the corrupt
right-wing government (including a 44-day strike by Oaxaca schoolteachers
leading that mass movement), a prolonged strike by miners and steelworkers, and
a huge conflict with federal and state riot police in the militant community of
San Salvador Atenco in Mexico state.

There is more to come. Already LópezObrador’s center-left Party
of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) has set a series of dates for mass
mobilization going into the autumn, mobilization which could easily escape its
control.

Why has this huge social conflict
built up over the summer? Two factors underlie much of the tension: (1) the
build-up to the presidential election, which the Mexican oligarchy, in close
collaboration with the ruling circles of the United States, was desperate not
to lose to even the moderate left, and (2) the progress of the “Other Campaign,”
the project of uniting and building Mexico’s social movements from below,
launched by Subcomandante Marcos and the EZLN a year
ago.

But behind these factors are more
fundamental issues. Since the election as president of right-wing Svengali and narcho-politician in
chief Carlos Salinas de Gotari in 1988, Mexico
has been suffering the continued pressure of neoliberalism,
which in as a result of the NAFTA agreement has wrecked traditional communal
peasant agriculture and devastated agricultural communities.

The net result is an avalanche of
migrants to the cities, particularly Mexico
City, flooding the ranks of the informal economy and
with it urban mass poverty in the huge edge of town barrios. Social inequality
has deepened massively, in a country already one of the most unequal in the
world. Like Brazil, Mexico is a country where the rich live like the
rich in Switzerland and the
poor live like the poor in India.

Social tensions have been high
since the emergence of the Zapatista indigenous movement in 1994. With no
independent mass party representing the interests of the workers and the poor, Subcomandante Marcos and the EZLN have acted as a sort of
substitute leadership, giving consistent support to every militant struggle.
But paradoxically the Zapatistas themselves have been largely confined to their
Chiapas
mountain strongholds, a limitation that the Other Campaign aims to overcome.

How has this spring and summer of
battle unfolded?

Miners and
Steelworkers Strike

More than a quarter of a million
miners and steelworkers walked off the job March 1-3 in wildcat strikes at 70
companies in at least eight states from central to northern Mexico, virtually
paralyzing the mining industry.

The strike resulted from an attempt
by the government to remove the Mexican Miners Union’s top officer, General
Secretary NapleónGómezUrrutia, and replace him with Elías
Morales Hernández, a union dissident who is
reportedly backed by the Grupo Mexico mining company.
As Mexico
labor expert Dan La Botz explains:

“The strike by members of the National Union
of Mining and Metallurgical Workers of Mexico (SNTMMRM) resulted from both
labor union and political causes. The explosion and cave in at the Pasta de Conchos mine in San Juan de Las Sabinas,
Coahuila, in northern Mexico on Febuary
19 killed 65 miners. The Miners Union leader GómezUrrutia blamed the employer, GrupoMexico,
calling the deaths “industrial homicide.” The Pasta de Conchos
cave-in set off a storm. Throughout Mexico politicians, academics,
intellectuals, and ordinary people criticized the mining company...

“While miners throughout the country mourned
the death of their brothers and complained of health and safety conditions in
their own mines, there was no official or wildcat strike in the immediate
aftermath of the accident.

“Then, on February 28 the Mexican Secretary of
Labor announced that GómezUrrutia
was not actually the head of the union, but that the real general secretary was
Elías Morales Hernández.
The government’s action was based on part of Mexican labor law known as “taking
note” (toma de nota), under
which the government recognizes the legally elected officers of labor unions.” [1]

The government turned to violent
repression of the striking miners and steelworkers supporting them. On April 20
eight hundred state and federal police launched an assault on 500 striking
workers who had been occupying a steel mill in the small city of Lázaro Cárdenas.
Two were killed, five seriously injured and 40 wounded.

Now that Felipe Calderón
has declared himself winner of the presidential elections GrupoMexico
has been on the offensive against the miners. At Nacozari,
one of the world’s largest copper mines, just a few miles south of the U.S.
border, 1,400 miners have been on strike since March 24. On July 12 the board
said they’d abandoned their jobs, and gave the mine’s owner, GrupoMexico,
permission to close down operations, effectively firing the strikers. At the
time of writing, the strike is unresolved.

Bloody Conflict in Atenco

San Salvador Atenco, 30 kms west of Mexico
City, is a largely agricultural community. In 2001 its
inhabitants waged a huge and successful battle against the building of a new MexicoCity airport, which would
have confiscated their land and destroyed their livelihoods. The
organization which led that struggle, the FPDT (Peoples’ Front in Defense of
Land), remained in existence.

This militant community invited Subcommandante Marcos to speak in the town on May Day. Two
days later police attempted to arrest flower sellers from Atenco
who set up their stalls on some land owned by the American multinational
Wal-Mart in the nearby community of Texcoco. The
flower sellers called for help on their mobile phones and hundreds arrived to
beat back the police attack. A day of bloody battles followed, in which two
people were killed by paramilitary riot police.

Next morning the federal riot
police carried out a brutal attack on the town, which involved—as is the style
in Mexico—brutal
beatings, the wrecking of homes, the theft of money and the arrest of more than
one hundred. In jail dozens were subject to torture and more than 20 women were
raped or otherwise sexually abused. Some key leaders of the community,
including FPDT leaders Ignacio del Valle and Felipe
Alvarez, remain in jail accused of “armed kidnapping” (a reference to the
abduction of several cops during the first day of the battle).

The Atenco
attack caused outrage in Mexico
and beyond because television reporters were allowed to film many of the
events, including the beating of one man by more than 20 riot cops. As a
consequence of the Atenco attack the Zapatista
leadership declared a red alert and started a nationwide campaign for the
release of the imprisoned Atencocampesinos.

In a statement on May 4, the
Revolutionary Workers Party who support the Fourth International, declared the
events at Atenco to be “a deliberate provocation
against the Other Campaign” saying that “without a shadow of doubt” the police
attacks has been designed to coincide with Marcos’s visit, and to impede the
progress of his campaign. After finishing the Valley
of Mexico part of his trip Marcos was
due to travel to San Luis Potosí, where an important rally
for the release of political prisoners was due to take place.

Uprising and Terror
in Oaxaca

Oaxacastate on the
Pacific coast has a long militant history. In the early 1970s it was the site
of a militant guerrilla struggle led by the Party of the Poor, which resulted
in near-genocidal repression in which thousands of young people assumed to
support the guerrilla were killed.

Over the summer there has been a
prolonged struggle against the ultra-corrupt state government of right-wing
Governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, a member of the PRI
(Institutional Revolutionary Party, until recently the main party of the
Mexican elite). It started with a strike by militant teachers for better wages
and more financial support for poor students, but soon mushroomed into a
general campaign to force Ulises Ruiz to quit.

The teachers and their allies
occupied the main square (zócalo ) in the city of Oaxaca,
including taking over some government buildings. On June 14 state and federal
paramilitary police launched a violent attack on the protesters’ encampment in
which several people (the exact number is unknown) were killed. The very next
day the teachers and their supporters retook the zócalo,
instituting a two-month period of virtual “dual power” in the city and much of
the state. Indeed on July 5 the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca (known
by its Spanish initials APPO) declared itself to be the legitimate government
of the state.

Since then there have been repeated
mass marches, assassinations of popular leaders by “unknown” gunmen who have
opened fire on several demonstrations, the takeover of several radio and
television stations to put the mass media at the service of the people, police
attacks on those stations, and at the time of writing (late August) a threat by
Oaxaca business people to stage a state-wide strike against…the inability of
the state government to stop all the strikes!

[A photo by Netherlands Indymedia shows riot police waiting in front of aOaxaca
cathedral. In response to their inability to crush the mass movement
politically, Ulises Ruiz—backed by Vicente Fox’s
national government—has unleashed a reign of terror in the streets of Oaxaca. Right-wing death
squads prowl the city by night and have carried out drive-by shootings at radio
and television stations, as well as opening fire on several demonstrations.]

On August 21, the Channel 9
television station headquarters, used as a headquarters by the dissident
movement, was attacked and burned by right-wing thugs, making it unusable.

On August 22, city and state police
agents, dressed in black and wearing masks, traveled throughout the city in a
caravan of motorcycles and pick-up trucks. The convoy of 34 vehicles joined up
at about twenty minutes after midnight and opened fire on TV and radio security
watchposts from their moving vehicles. As the caravan
passed radio station La Ley 710, teacher Lorenzo San
Pablo Cervantes received bullet wounds to the back. He was taken to the
hospital and later died.

In Oaxaca, as elsewhere, right-wing government
forces are trying to effectively militarize the struggle, create an atmosphere
of fear and tension, create a mass feeling of crisis and disorder, and blame
all this on the rebellion—to lay the groundwork for a future bloody crushing of
the movement by the army or police.

The situation is now extremely
dangerous for the mass movement, especially as tactical divisions have emerged,
with the teachers abandoning their 44-day strike without having achieved their
objectives. The fate of the Oaxaca struggle is
closely linked with that against electoral fraud centered on the occupation of
central Mexico City.

The Electoral Fraud

In the run-up to the July 2
presidential election the two leading candidates, Felipe Calderón
of the PAN and Manuel LópezObrador
of the PRD, appeared to be neck and neck, but with some polls putting LópezObrador slightly ahead. In
the event, when the final result was posted, the official result gave a slight
advantage to Calderón, leading to widespread
suspicions of electoral fraud.

“Given the close vote and AMLO’s (LópezObrador’s)
charges of electoral fraud, a partial recount of 9% of the country’s 131,000
polling stations was ordered by the Federal Electoral Tribunal. AMLO and his
supporters, however, have been demanding a 100% recount. The recount, which
began on August 9, has not resolved the dispute. The AMLO forces charge serious
discrepancies, even on the basis of the small 9% sample, among them:in 43% of the sample, Calderón
had been accredited with more votes thanhe actually received, lowering his total number of votes by 13,500. This
was 5000% more votes than AMLO lost in the recount.

“In 65% of the recounted polling
stations, there were either more ballots deposited than there were voters or
more voters than there were corresponding ballots. In Mexico, control of the paper
ballots is extremely strict. In the 9% of the polling stations that were
recounted, discrepancies involved 120,000 ballots—half the difference between
the two candidates nationwide across all the polling stations.

“More than 30% of the supposedly
sealed ballot boxes had been opened after the elections, raising the specter
that their contents were altered.” [2]

Since July 30 the center of Mexico City, including the
Zócalo (the city’s huge central square), has been
occupied by tens of thousands of protesters. According to Gellert:

“Many far left and social
organizations that didn’t participate in AMLO’s
campaign are involved in the anti-fraud protests. Along the 8-kilometer stretch
of encampments, a wide array of neighborhood associations, unions, student
groups, and political organizations can be found.

“Unfortunately, the Other Campaign,
an initiative launched by the Zapatista National Liberation Army and headed by
the charismatic Subcommandante Marcos, while
condemning the fraud, has abstained from the mass demonstrations. During the
election campaign, the Other Campaign centered most of its fire on AMLO and the
obvious deficiencies in the PRD’s program and
methods. Some organizations that participated in the Other Campaign are,
however, involved in the anti-fraud protests.”

The huge political crisis in Mexico is deeply rooted in the massive social
inequality that has been deepened by decades of neoliberalism
and intensified subordination of Mexico
to the needs of U.S.
multinational corporations and agribusiness. Violent repression, harsh methods
of struggle, and occasional outbursts of fury against those at the bottom of
the pile are the inevitable results.

Regrettably what the poor and
oppressed of Mexico lack is a nationally structured anti-capitalist political
party which can represent them, coordinate the struggles, and intervene on the
national political terrain.

As we noted above, the Zapatistas
and the Other Campaign can to a certain extent play the role of a substitute
leadership, but only partially, occasionally, and inadequately. While the far
left in Mexico
has been correct to support the Other Campaign, the key question is what
lasting political results it will lead to.

NOTES

[1] See “Mexican
miners and steelworkers on strike,” International Viewpoint, May 2006.

5. Background
on the Zapatistas’ “Other Campaign”
LA OTRA CAMPAÑA

by Roger
Stoll

[The authorhas studied Spanish at the language
school at Oventic, in the Zapatista zone, and is
working on a music transcription and translation project involving recordings
made with Radio Insurgente (about which see notes at
end of article).

Introduction

On the morning of January 1, 1994, with the seizure of
governmental offices in San Cristóbal
de lasCasas, Chiapas,
Mexico, the
Zapatistas announced their existence to the world. They had emerged from the
remote highlands of Chiapas, the southernmost
and poorest state of Mexico.
The Zapatista National Liberation Army (“EZLN” in its Spanish acronym), was
made up of indigenous Mayan peasants, in their words “the poorest of the poor.”
They wore black ski-masks “so as to be seen,” they explained. Their top
military leaders included women, such as the late Comandante
Ramona, who stood, in bright-colored traditional embroidery, about four-feet
tall—not so extraordinary for a Mayan, but small enough to earn her the
affectionate title “the smallest of the small.” Their mestizo
Mexican spokesperson, the incongruously tall and pale Subcomandante
Marcos, effortlessly dispensed poetic prose, politics, and wit in three
languages: that morning of the takeover of San Cristóbal de lasCasas , tourists in the street asked Marcos if they would miss
their transportation connections; with exquisite politeness Marcos replied, “Forgive
us, but this is a revolution.”

Their style, poetic language, and
unquestioned heroism in battle made the Zapatistas immediately irresistible
even to many who barely understood their politics, origins, or purpose. But for
those who looked closely, there was so much there. The Zapatistas addressed
themselves to that persistent enemy of the peoples of the world, the capitalist
global empire. They denounced the capitalist juggernaut precisely in its neoliberal form that had greatly increased the rate at
which Mexico’s
corn-growing peasants were driven off their land into paupery
and desperation. And to a divided global left, deeply wounded by the
disappointment and disastrous collapse of eastern European socialism and the
capitalist-roaders of China, the unclassifiable and
magically inclusive Zapatista ideology seemed like water in the desert. Thus
the Zapatista rebellion was from the moment of its appearance a political,
indigenous, peasant movement activists in the industrial north could look to,
not just for inspiration or in solidarity, but for direction and example.

Now, after years of victories and
defeats, political engagement and autonomy, comes the latest initiative by the
Zapatistas. Dubbed “The Other Campaign” (La OtraCampaña, or simply La Otra), its
characteristically sly appellation manages to be self-deprecating while at the
same time mocking the presumed political centrality of this year’s Mexican
presidential campaign. La Otra is the Zapatistas’
attempt to reach beyond their geographic and political borders to forge a
national left from all manner of resistance, organized and not, throughout
Mexico—a true left, that makes no concession to the reigning macroeconomics of neoliberalism (an economics which has been embraced by the
center-left presidential candidate Andrés Manuel LópezObrador of the Partido de la RevoluciónDemocrática, or PRD).

La Otra
consists chiefly of a Zapatista tour of indefinite duration to each of Mexico’s 31 states and the federal district to
meet with people in struggle from peasant farmers in the most remote regions of
the country to maquiladora workers in Tijuana. The Zapatistas
listen to people recount their struggles, and they take notes. The tour is not
yet a plan to reshape Mexico
and the world, but perhaps a search party to look for one.

Mexico Rising

If you didn’t know anything of Mexico’s recent electoral history,
The Other Campaign/ La OtraCampaña
would seem not only astonishingly prescient but impeccably timed. For La Otra is a public announcement that Mexico’s electoral system is not
just bankrupt as a political option for most Mexicans—workers, the unemployed,
peasants, the indigenous—but is thoroughly broken even on its own terms of
capitalist democracy. As of this writing, the Mexican presidential election
remains undecided and under a toxic cloud of statistical and procedural
anomalies that can only be explained by massive fraud by the ruling PartidoAcciónNacional (or PAN) and its candidate Felipe Calderón. The center-left candidate of
the PRD, Andrés Manuel LópezObrador (often called AMLO), is challenging the
result, calling for a vote-by-vote recount. He is supported by a
popular, massive civil disobedience mobilization in the form of a tent city
encampment in the heart of Mexico City,
blocking some roadways and snarling downtown traffic.

Meanwhile in the southern state of Oaxaca, the mass
protests and direct action of schoolteachers and their supporters have
culminated in the teachers’ seizure of 12 radio stations. They are calling for
the resignation of the Oaxacan governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz. The teachers hold Ruiz responsible for
the violence of police and unidentified gunmen that has resulted in at
[several] deaths and disappearances, and numerous injured, and they’ve accused
Governor Ruiz of having rigged Oaxaca state elections two years ago.

Further south, [next to Oaxaca] in
the state of Chiapas, another dispute over elections is taking shape between
the PRD incumbent governor Juan Sabines and the
candidate of the PartidoRevoluciónInstitucional (or PRI), Jose Antonio Aguilar Bodegas
(who is also backed by the ruling PAN).

In light of these events, the
non-participatory stand of the Zapatistas and La Otra
toward elections, controversial at first, may begin to seem to the populace
reasonable after all, and Zapatista followers might justly tell AMLO’s hopeful supporters, “We are not at all happy to say
this, but we told you so.”

La Sexta Appears,
La Otra Is Born

The first draft of La Otra’s
itinerary appeared more or less within the pages of The Sixth Declaration of
the Lacandon Jungle (La SextaDeclaración de la SelvaLacandona, aka La Sexta), released in July of last year. Previously [widely
posted] on the Internet, La Sexta is now available in
a handy, bilingual print edition, along with an excellent essay by Luis Hernández Navarro, as well as an interview with Subcomandante Marcos by Pacifica Free Speech Radio News’s
Aura Bogado. (The book, part of the Open Media Series
edited by Greg Ruggiero, is published by City Lights Books and is beautifully
produced, with photographs and ample explanatory notes. All the material quoted
or cited in this article is from this edition.)

When La Sexta
first appeared in the summer of 2005 it was met with intense interest and
enthusiasm by the Mexican left. Its call for a united global movement against
capitalism, neoliberal economics, and all oppressions
of class, race, gender, language, and ethnicity was taken up by left labor,
activists, and intellectuals. La Jornada, the
eminent left independent daily newspaper, ran news articles, essays, debates,
letters—sometimes as many as a dozen in a single issue—celebrating, analyzing,
interpreting, and criticizing the document. Even Vicente Fox, the conservative
Mexican president, publicly welcomed the Zapatistas into Mexico’s national
political process (as if they weren’t already in the thick of it), and blithely
interpreted La Sexta as meaning that the Zapatistas
had laid down their arms and forsworn their version of armed struggle and
self-defense. (This was a mistaken interpretation, by the way, made by a few
left commentators as well).

Incidentally, this writer happened
to be in Chiapas
in 2005 during the Zapatistas’ Red Alert (when they stopped speaking to the
outside world and closed their autonomous regions to international visitors)
and the subsequent release of La Sexta. I felt the
excitement in San Cristóbal
de lasCasas. Numerous
cafe-meetings were organized to discuss La Sexta, and
one I went to, at a spacious cafe/roastery, was
attended by well over a hundred people.

The Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle (La Sexta)

In its spare, self-consciously biblical language, La Sexta is a plea—a shout of ¡Yabasta! (“Enough is enough!”) on
behalf of the peoples of the world. It is an eloquent piece of political
literature filled with compassion, political yearning, and resolve. While
interpretations, summaries, and commentaries on La Sexta
abound, La Sexta itself is so lucid and beautiful a
document that it ought to be read before turning to any commentary. From La Sexta’s opening: “This is our simple word which seeks to
touch the hearts of humble and simple people like ourselves, but people who,
like ourselves, are also dignified and rebel. This is our simple word for
recounting what our path has been and where we are now, in order to explain how
we see the world and our country, in order to say what we are thinking of doing
and how we are thinking of doing it, and in order to invite other people to walk
with us[.]” (60/61)

In such language La Sexta proceeds to encapsulate the history of the Zapatista
struggle, Mexican politics, and Zapatismo’s critique
of modern capitalism in Mexico
and the world. It ends with the announcement of The Other Campaign (La Otra). Here is La Sexta on how
the Zapatistas came to be, the 1994 New Year’s Day rebellion, and its
conclusion:

“In the beginning there were not
many of us, just a few, going this way and that, talking with and listening to
other people like ourselves. We did that for many years, and we did it in
secret, without making a stir…We remained like that for about ten years, and
when we had grown, we were many thousands. We trained ourselves quite well in
politics and weapons, and, suddenly, when the rich were throwing their New Year’s
Eve parties, we fell upon their cities and just took them over…Then the rich
sent their great armies to do away with us, just like they always do when the
exploited rebel. We were running and fighting, fighting and running, just like our
ancestors had done…

“Then the people from the cities
went out into the streets and began shouting for an end to the war. And then we
stopped our war, and we listened to those brothers and sisters from the city who were telling us to try to reach an arrangement or
an accord with the bad governments, so that the problem could be resolved
without a massacre...So we set aside the fire and took up the word.” (62/63,
66/67)

The Zapatistas then entered into
lengthy negotiations with the government, leading to the San Andrés Accords—to which the govern
famously agreed and which it infamously later rejected. Here is La Sexta on the betrayal of the Zapatistas with the 2001
rejection of the San Andrés Accords by all the major
political parties in the government: “But it happened that the politicians from
the PRI, the PAN, and the PRD reached an agreement among themselves, and they
simply did not recognize indigenous rights and culture…We can no longer believe
that agreements will be respected. Take that into account so you can learn from
what happened to us.” (74/75) But, La Sexta reports,
the Zapatistas decided to implement the Accords on their own, without
government permission, establishing a measure of regional autonomy, with their
own civil government structures. (76/77, 78/79)

La Sexta
also serves as a simply written primer on the nature of capitalism:

“In capitalism, some people have
money, or capital, and factories, stores, fields, and many other things, and
there are others who have nothing to work with but their strength and
knowledge. In capitalism, those who have money and things give the orders, and
those who only have the ability to work obey.

“Capitalism means only a few have
great wealth...So capitalism is based on the exploitation of the workers, which
means the few exploit the workers and take out all the profits they can…[T]he workers receive a wage that barely allows them to eat
a little and rest for a bit...Capitalism is a system where the robbers go free,
and are actually admired and held up as examples.” (92/93, 94/95)

La Sexta
even introduces the concept of commoditization, noting that according to
capitalism, “everything must be able to be bought and sold,” concealing the
exploited labor within it. “[F]or example, we see coffee in its little package...but
we do not see the coyote who paid [the coffee-growing peasant] so cheaply for
his work, nor do we see the workers in the large company working their hearts
out to package the coffee.” (94/95, 96/97)

Neoliberal
capitalism, according to La Sexta, means war on the
world literally and economically, through wars of conquest and occupation, as
well as the machinations of the international financial institutions: “Sometimes
that conquest is by armies who invade a country and conquer it by force. But
sometimes it is by way of the economy, in other words, the big capitalists put
their money into another country or they lend it money, but on the condition
that what they tell them to do is obeyed.” (98/99)

In Mexico, La Sexta
explains, neoliberalism results in the Mexican
government functioning as the wholesaler of the country’s wealth, “something
like employees in a store, who have to do everything possible to sell
everything and to sell it very cheap.” La Sexta gives
the example of changes to the Mexican Constitution allowing traditional
communal lands to be bought and sold, as well as the attempted privatizations
of the national oil company, PEMEX, as well as social security, electricity,
water, the forests, “everything, until nothing of Mexico is left…” (112/113)

La Sexta
concludes with a sketch for La OtraCampaña, in which the Zapatistas would set out for every
corner of Mexico
at the beginning of 2006:

“What we think is that, with these
people and organizations of the Left, we can make a plan for going to all those
parts of Mexico
where there are humble and simple people like ourselves.

“And we are not going to tell them
what they should do or give them orders.

“Nor are we going to ask them to
vote for a candidate, since we already know that the ones who exist are neoliberals.

“Nor are we going to tell them to
be like us, nor to rise up in arms.

“What we are going to do is to ask
them what their lives and struggles are like…what their thoughts about our
country are, and what we should do so capitalism does not defeat us.” (126/127)

And thus began La OtraCampaña.

The Breaking Wave

Luis Hernández Navarro is a
columnist with La Jornada and was a key
adviser to the EZLN during the San Andrés
negotiations. He has written an excellent and frequently eloquent essay
entitled “The Breaking Wave” discussing La Sexta and
La Otra. This essay is invaluable to non-Mexican
readers for its interpretation of La Sexta in the
context of contemporary Mexican electoral politics and left politics generally.
(The essay appears along with La Sexta in the book The
Other Campaign/ La OtraCampaña,
mentioned above.)

The essay briefly traces the course
of the Zapatistas’ relations with the PRD—from “friendly” in 1996 to the 2001
betrayal by the PRD, in collaboration with PRI and PAN legislators, in the
rejections of the San Andrés Accords. As noted in La Sexta, this rejection was the turning point for the
Zapatistas, driving them away from any hope of achieving their goals through
negotiations with the government. “The moment of breakdown between the
political class and society was consummated in April 2001, when the parties
voted unanimously in the Senate for the constitutional reform on rights and
indigenous culture that betrayed the San Andrés
accords.” (36/37)

But rather than surrender the
political, legal, and cultural rights they thought they had won in
negotiations, the Zapatistas responded by constructing their own autonomy as a
practical implementation of the Accords: “the Zapatistas concentrated on
building five autonomous regional governments which were baptized ‘Councils of
Good Government,’ or ‘Caracoles.’ They named their own authorities and took
charge of organizing education, health, and the administration of justice
themselves. In different regions of the country, the indigenous people decided
to drop the fruitless struggle for autonomy through legal reforms and moved
forward to achieve autonomy on their own, without asking permission.” (10/11)

Hernández
puts La Sexta’s analysis of the Mexican electoral
left this way: “Regarding the Mexican Left, La Sexta
asserts that the [PRD]—which stands a good possibility of winning the
presidential election of 2006—is not a party of the Mexican Left. La Sexta determines what is and is not on the Mexican Left
according to the criterion of whether it struggles against or resists neoliberal capitalism. And the PRD does not.” (18/19) (As
if to emphasize the point, since the issuance of La Sexta
and the launch of La Otra, the PRD’s
presidential candidate, Andrés Manuel LópezObrador, has explicitly
embraced neoliberal macroeconomics, and failed to
denounce the massive, orchestrated police riot against the autonomous
Zapatista-identified community of San Salvador Atenco.)

La Sexta
seeks more than just to revive the Mexican left, explains the essay.

“La Sexta’s goal, in
part, is to rearrange the Mexico from below into a new political
force—explicitly Leftist, anti-neoliberal, and
anti-capitalist—that is, clearly distinct from the legally recognized political
parties that now exist ...As a social and political initiative, it renounces
the illusion that one can find shortcuts and miraculous solutions in the
struggle for the transformation of a country. It rejects the notion that
history is made by messiahs and charismatic leaders, and the history it is
calling on the people of Mexico
to make will only be possible by means of another kind of politics.” (20/21)

As to how the Zapatistas will enact
these goals, Hernández explains, “The organizing tool
for making La Sexta a reality is The Other Campaign.
The Zapatista initiative to tour the entire country to listen to the
communities articulate their resistance parallels the traditional campaigns of
the registered parties, but is actually a non-electoral campaign that seeks to
explore the possibility of doing politics another way during the federal
elections period.” (22/23) Pursuant to La Sexta’s
call, “In 2005, hundreds of organizations, political leaders, and citizens
responded to a Zapatista invitation from the Lacandon
Jungle to participate in a diverse range of meetings called in order to debate
and organize what would turn out to be the Other Campaign.” (26/27) And
everyone came: “The diversity of their ranks was surprising: unionists,
indigenous organizers, intellectuals, cultural workers, artists, religious
people, neighborhood activists, feminists, gays, lesbians, human rights
advocates, environmentalists, and students.” (26/27, 28/29)

The actual participants in La OtraCampaña’s cross-country trek
include “a mixed bag of old and new social insubordinates: fishermen, small
merchants, rural settlers affected by the construction of public infrastructure
projects, electricity consumers paying high rates, assembly-line factory
workers, victims of natural disasters who have not been supported by the government,
indigenous, poor peasants, defenders of the native corn (and enemies of
genetically modified corn), democratic teachers, prostitutes, homosexuals,
workers, and youth.” (52/53, 54/55) In the meetings taking place on the tour,
the essayist sees “a common language” being created, “a language that many
educated people despise and do not understand well.” (56/57)

This language, taking guidance from
La Sexta’s political and economic analyses, is a
familiar one, naturally, since, in Hernández’s
trenchant formulation, “The old electoral system asks, what can
we do with the poor? The Other Campaign asks,
what can we do with the rich? And it responds, struggle against them.…[La Otra] recuperates the
language of Class in an epoch when the institutional Left is trying to get rid
of it. Its speech—as has been the tradition of the statements of the EZLN—is
increasingly more related to the proclamations and manifestoes of the
indigenous and peasant rebellions of the nineteenth century and with the
programs of popular and workers struggles of the twentieth century.” (56/57) In
other words, it is the language of the revolutionary tradition.

Regarding the Zapatista stance
toward elections, the essay makes a point the Mexican and international press
repeatedly (perhaps willfully) miss: that La Otra is “a
non-electoral political offensive during election time. It does not call for a
vote for or against any candidate. Nor does it promote abstention.” (44/45) No
matter how many times the Zapatistas repeat that they are not calling for an
electoral boycott, the press says they are. Indeed, since the publication of
this book we’ve seen the Zapatistas be among the first to denounce the fraud
that may yet rob the PRD of its electoral victory—a principled stand that they
took in defense of those who support the PRD and the electoral process, echoing
the Zapatistas’ principled stand in defense of LópezObrador, the PRD presidential candidate, when he was
threatened with prison in 2005.

The essay’s title, “The Breaking
Wave,” is Hernández’s poetic premonition of Mexico’s political upheaval to come: “A strong
wave is threatening to crash against the long-standing political framework in Mexico.
It comes from very far away and is fortified by the storm winds that are
shaking the country...when it rises and breaks, it
will shake the existing system of representation.” (50/51) The first stirrings
of that wave are in La Otra: “A great ripple is
crossing Mexico.
The breaking of the wave is beginning to be heard. That is the sound of The
Other Campaign.” (58/59)

More Information

The Other Campaign/La OtraCampaña

All quoted or cited material in this article is from the
book the other campaign/ la otracampaña
by Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatistas,
introductory essay by Luis Hernández Navarro,
interview with Marcos by Aura Bogado, photos by Tim
Russo, edited by Greg Ruggiero, Open Media Series; published by City Lights
Books, 2006, bilingual Spanish-English facing pages. All royalties from the
book support independent media projects in Chiapas. For more information see: http://www.citylights.com/pub/openmed.html

To hear the voice of the indigenous rebel communities in Chiapas, tune into the
Zapatistas’ clandestine short wave and FM radio broadcasts here. Past programs
are also available for downloading. An incredible resource for those interested
in not just hearing Subcomandante Marcos, but the
insurgent women, men, and young people who are struggling together for
democracy, dignity, and justice in Mexico.

To get a deeper sense of the indigenous struggle in Chiapas and the ongoing
human rights abuses and paramilitary attacks suffered by the communities there,
take a look at Enlace Civil’s excellent web page.

[This article, edited somewhat
for Labor Stndard,was posted on the CounterPunch web site on August 30, 2006. Writing from Oaxaca, the author describes himself as formerly “a
long-time maverick physics faculty member at the University of Massachusetts
Boston Campus. Now retired, he has lived for
seven years in Oaxaca.”
He can be contacted here]

Oaxaca
shares, with Chiapas and Guerrero, the
distinction of being one of the three poorest states of Mexico. These three bastions of
extreme poverty, albeit among the richest states of Mexico
in natural resources, lie along the Pacific coastline in southeastern Mexico.
Oaxaca is flanked to its east by Chiapas and to its west
by Guerrero. Its population, about 3.5 million (2003 estimate), is unique among
Mexican states in containing the largest fraction, 2/3, and the largest
absolute number of people with indigenous ancestry.

Which of the 31
states holds top place for corruption would probably be impossible to measure
in this intensely contested Mexican arena, as highlighted in the fraudulent
July 2, 2006, presidential election, but for sure Oaxaca merits high placement on the
corruption scale. Unsurprisingly, the overwhelming majority of the
indigenous population is among the most impoverished. Naturally they are very
sympathetic to the struggles of indigenous peoples in other parts of Mexico to better their lives, such as the
attempts of the Zapatista base support communities in Chiapas, that have declared themselves “in rebellion” and asserted
their autonomy, often at great cost due to state and federal efforts to crush
them.

The 70,000 or so teachers in the
state educational institutions, state employees, are, by Oaxaca standards, far from poor. They are
part of the state’s “middle class.” So it’s not as though the majority of poor
people are usually very sympathetic. This quarter-century-long tradition of aOaxaca
teachers’ strike each May never before was much more than a nuisance for the
city business people, for a week or so, until the union and the state
government negotiated a settlement, the teachers ended their occupation of the
city center, and returned to their homes throughout the state.

Why was this year so different?

It will come as no surprise to losAmericanos that in Mexico, as in the U.S., there are “company unions.”
But here, south of the border, the “company” is the ruling party of the federal
government, a big company indeed. The National Union of Educational Workers (El
SindicatoNacional de TrabajadoresEducativo, SNTE) is
a very large and powerful union, hierarchical in structure. For over 70 years
the SNTE had been in bed with the government of the ruling party, the Revolutionary
Institutional Party, El PartidoRevolucionarioInstitucional (PRI). In fact, until recently, the
General Secretary of SNTE, Elba Esther Gordillo, was
second from the top of the PRI leadership, just below Roberto Madrazo. Section 22 of SNTE is the Oaxaca part of the National Teachers Union.

Among Mexican teachers there is
another formation, the National Educational Workers Coordinating Committee (ComitéCoordinadorNacional de TrabajadoresEducativo CNTE). In Oaxaca
the CNTE, whose members belong to SNTE Section 22, play a leading role in
setting Section 22 policy. Section 22 has long been regarded as one of the most
militant, independent sections of SNTE.

On May 15, National Teachers’ Day
in Oaxaca,
the leadership of Section 22 of SNTE declared that if their negotiations with
the state government did not progress, they would initiate a statewide strike
the following week. The teachers were demanding an upgrade in the “zonification” of Oaxaca,
which would increase the federally designated minimum wage for the state. The “logic”
(i.e. rationalization) of the federal government for having lower legal minimum
wages in poor states like Oaxaca
is apparently that it’s cheaper to live in a more impoverished region than in
one with a higher average income. Such an upgrade of Oaxaca
would affect waged workers in Oaxaca
who are paid the minimum wage, but would not affect those paid above the
minimum, like the teachers. For themselves the teachers demanded a salary
increase.

Their other demands involved improved
school facilities and meeting students’ needs. Much of the money supposedly
budgeted for education is siphoned off by corrupt officials. There is no
accountability, a process not even legally required in Oaxaca and no bookkeeping.

Negotiations from May 15 to 22
between the union and the state, instead of moving towards a compromise
agreement, became even more acrimonious. Beginning May 22, a large group of
teachers, other education workers, family members, allied individuals, and
members of allied organizations, numbering perhaps between 35,000 and 60,000
(hard numbers are impossible to know) occupied the center of Oaxaca City—the
large central park (the zócalo) and some 56 blocks
surrounding it—with their encampment. Local business, hotel, and restaurant
owners were, by and large, critical because of financial losses caused by the
disruption.

Quite normal.
The ritual of an annual teachers’ strike was by now about a quarter century
old. But never before had it been so large, so prolonged.

Even now, no end is in sight.

During a period of barely three and
a half weeks, May 22 to June 14, the strength of the teachers’ opposition to
Governor UlisesRuízOrtíz continued to grow, with additional adherents nursing
their own grievances against the dictatorial regime allying with the formidable
SNTE contingent. Frequent marches, and two mega-marches, the first on Friday
June 2 with between 50,000 and 100,000 (the police and SNTE estimates,
respectively), and the second on Wednesday, June 7, with 120,000 brought to the
city demonstrations of size and vehemence never before seen here. I watched the
June 7 march from the parapet on the north side of the Plaza de Danza as endless mockery of UlisesRuíz paraded past, demanding boisterously that he
leave the governorship. Undoubtedly there were state spies in civilian clothes
with cameras, cell phones, video cameras, and tape recorders, but no one seemed
in the least intimidated or cautious.

The entire event was permeated with
a sense of people’s power.

On June 14, when Ulises unexpectedly ordered state police to carry out a
surprise early pre-dawn attack on the sleeping teachers (many of them women
with their children), destroying their tents and other camping gear and firing
tear gas and bullets, even using a police helicopter that sprayed tear gas on
the campers, to drive them out of the city center, he ignited a mass uprising
throughout the state and beyond. The teachers fought back and drove out the
police after about four hours, recapturing the city center and gaining
admiration throughout the state for their gritty determination not to be
terrorized into submission.

In his year and a half in office
since December 1, 2005, Ulises had succeeded in
generating a powder keg of hatred across the state toward him because of his
tyrannical rule. This included his overt attempt to destroy the state’s
largest-circulation daily newspaper, Noticias de Oaxaca , his destruction of much-loved parts of the capital
city’s world-famous cultural patrimony, numerous killings by armed thugs tied
to the ruling party, in communities struggling against corrupt and oppressive
state-appointed municipal administrations. In sum, it was his attempt to rule
by “excessively overt” terror, including kidnappings, jailings
on baseless charges, torture, and death, and always impunity for the state
thugs terrorizing the people, that turned the
population en masse against him.

Moreover, history was against him.
Fresh in people’s memory was the sadistic early May attack in San Salvador Atenco in Mexico State by federal, state, and municipal
police, and the outrage against the authorities then—incarceration and worse
for the victims, impunity for the perpetrators. There was a pervasive sense
that in such a society, everyone is a “political prisoner unto death.” A
multitude of civic organizations in, and outside of, Oaxaca swarmed to declare their solidarity
with the teachers. Immediately after the attack the teachers announced, and two
days later led a huge march, their third mega-march, with 400,000, that included
many new adherents. They all demanded URO’s
resignation or removal from office.

The show of strength quickly led to
formation of a statewide assembly that termed itself the Popular Assembly of
the People of Oaxaca, Asemblea Popular del Pueblo de Oaxaca. Though
instigated as a result of the teachers’ initiative and the ugly state
repression, the assembly went far beyond the teachers’ original demands, which
had been limited to educational matters. Ousting a hated governor had been done
before on three occasions in Oaxaca.
Not trivial, risky of course, but not by itself a revolutionary act.

APPO is established, sets
revolutionary goals

In addition to the immediate third
mega-march on June 16 (two days after the assault), the popular movement of
teachers and other members of civil society held the first statewide popular
assembly the following day, justthree days after the attack of June 14. In this precedent-breaking
assembly meeting, the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca (APPO, by its
initials in Spanish) adopted a truly revolutionary program by declaring itself
the supreme authority in Oaxaca, and asserting the illegitimacy of the entire
political structure, which had ruthlessly run Oaxaca as a
PRI-terrorist-controlled state for nearly 80 years.

APPO’s
deliberately broad representation evidently excluded any explicitly political
groups, i.e. it was to be a “non-political” formation, truly a people’s
government. As Nancy Davies wrote in her report [on the Narco
News web site], “Popular Assembly to Oppose the State Government,” its initial
meeting on June 17 “was attended by 170 people representing 85 organizations.”
Included, or at least invited, “were all the SNTE delegates, union members,
social and political organizations, non-governmental organizations,
collectives, human rights organizations, parents, tenant farmers,
municipalities, and citizens of the entire state of Oaxaca.” Its intention was
to be open to all the citizens of the state. There was no attempt, so far as I
know, to exclude wealthy people from the assembly. Naturally, most very rich
people who saw their interests served by the URO regime would not want to be
involved in an effort to remove him and the rest of the governing apparatus,
but wealthy “mavericks” who rejected social injustice
were evidently welcome. The only “absolute requirement” for participation was
agreement that Ulises must go.

Flimsy barriers such as those that
had not prevented the police assault of June 14 were clearly inadequate. APPO
adherents went about establishing stronger barricades against future invasions.
They began commandeering buses, some commercial, as well as police and other
government vehicles, using some of them to block access roads to the zócalo and other APPO encampments. Other of the commandeered
vehicles they used for transportation.

APPO’s
major strategy for bringing pressure to bear on the government, in order to
force either URO’s resignation or his legal removal,
has been to literally prevent the institutional government from carrying out
its functions: legislative, judicial and executive (i.e. administrative). The
tactic deserves to be called aggressive civil disobedience, meaning that APPO
adherents carry out their forceful “illegal” actions as civilians (unarmed,
i.e. no firearms). Some of them have poles, iron rods, and even machetes, but
these are for self-defense. The culture here is not one of “turning the other
cheek.” They don’t sit down and pray if police attempt to beat them. They have
blocked highways, occupied government buildings, and made a good many tourists
and potential tourists reconsider Oaxaca
as a desirable destination, thereby shaking the economy

As for “winning the hearts and
minds” of Oaxaqueños, the hearts part of the task has
been in large part already accomplished, thanks to the arrogance and
aggressiveness of URO—the hatred he managed to sow since taking office as
governor on December 1, 2004 and which he’s now reaping.

Even people who are not thrilled
with APPO are so disgusted with URO that they are more likely to be passive
rather than actively opposing APPO by supporting the governor.

Winning minds, as APPO well knows,
is essential. They have made that a major part of their work. The government
and its corporate allies fully realize the importance of what people think. The
media of communication are therefore a prime arena in the contest to influence
people’s consciousness.

The fight for the communication
media

The very first action of the state
forces in their pre-dawn attack on June 14 was to destroy the teachers’ radio
station, Radio Plantón. It had been serving not only
as a source of pro-teacher propaganda since the start of the strike, but as a
vital communication link broadcasting (within its limited range) 24 hours a
day. Soon after the Radio Plantón equipment was
smashed, students at the Benito Juarez Autonomous University of Oaxaca (UABJO
in its Spanish initials) seized the university’s station, a licensed station
with a much more powerful transmitter, and kept it going non-stop in support of
the then rapidly-growing rebellion. The student-operated UABJO station was
attacked several times, first on June 22, and eventually put out of commission
after a diversionary tactic the night of August 8 enabled three people who had
earlier infiltrated the movement to enter and throw sulphuric
acid on the equipment, ending, at least for a time, those broadcasts.

Revolutions are not, by their
nature, tidy affairs. There is no simple chronology according to which, at
certain key dates, one important group of actors halts its activity and a
different group takes the stage.

Rather, a multitude of groups fills
the stage at any given time, and the flow of activity is continuous--no
separation of the actions marked by curtain calls. Thus it may be a
questionable effort to try to divide the flow into phases. While the attack of
June 14 did clearly mark a separation of events into two different phases, the
ensuing struggle has been, and will likely be a continuous flow. Nevertheless,
the action of the women who seized the state television and radio stations on
August 1 so powerfully upped the ante in the struggle to control the
communications media that I will say that act initiated a third phase of the
struggle.

On July 1, the day before
participants in La marcha de lascaserolas (the march of women beating their pots and
pans with wooden spoons) went on to seize the state TV and radio stations, only
Radio Universidad was broadcasting for the popular movement. By then it had
been on the air daily for almost of seven weeks. It was to continue for another
8 days until the sulphuric acid attack shut it down.
But by then Channel 9, TV Caserolas as some folks
dubbed it, had been broadcasting 8 days.

The move to seize, or as a graffiti
on the wall of the control room at the transmission tower phrased it, to
re-appropriate facilities paid for with the people’s money, was a bold
escalation in the struggle for the media.

Channel 9 and FM 96.9 covered the
entire state. For 3 weeks, from August 1 until the early morning assault on August
21, the “voices and images of the people” dominated these normally
state-controlled airwaves in the struggle aimed at “winning the minds” of the
people, although of course the powerful national corporate channels, TV Azteca and Televisa, continued
their pro-state broadcasts. But what a vision of hope sprang from the screen
those three weeks! Ordinary people in everyday clothes spoke of the reality of
their lives as they understood them, of what neo-liberalism meant to them, of
the Plan Pueblo Panama, of their loss of land to developers and international
paper companies, of ramshackle rural mountain schools without toilets, of
communities without safe water or sanitary drainage, and so on, all the needs
that could be met if wealth were not being stolen by rich capitalists and
corrupt government agents.

And not all was about Oaxaca and its problems.
The horizon of consciousness reached abroad as, on one occasion that Nancy mentioned to me,
Channel 9 broadcast a documentary videotape of living conditions of Palestinians
in the occupied territories. One can only imagine the level of global
grassroots solidarity if the media, worldwide, were controlled by popular
groups instead of transnational corporations.

This flood of uncontrolled,
unmediated, spontaneous communication among the population must have terrorized
the former economic and political rulers of Oaxaca by the threat it posed, but they
dared not try a repeat of their June 14 heavy-handed attempt to crush the
popular uprising.

Rather than risk another open
failure the state authorities pursued a strategy of clandestine warfare, as
described vividly by Diego Enrique Osorno in his 28
August special report from Oaxaca
to NarcoNews . The
desperate authorities pursued their so-called Operation “Clean-Up”. As Narco News stated, “Following the CIA’s ‘Psychological
Operations’ Manual for the Nicaraguan Contras, the State Government Has
Unleashed a Bloody Counterinsurgency Strategy to Eliminate the Social Movement”.

The onslaught by these clandestine
heavily-armed police officials and state thugs on the transmission facilities
of TV Caserola and Radio APPO up on Fortin Hill above
the city revealed the government’s panic. This assault, in the very early hours
on Monday 21 August, totally destroyed the control equipment housed in a
building at the base of the transmission tower. The racks of electronics were
smashed and sprayed with automatic weapons fire, bullet holes only inches apart
in some of the panels, which I photographed that Monday evening. There are, as
explained to me by a student friend involved with one of the movement radio
stations, several components that made up the state’s TV and radio stations: 1)
the studios where interviews, news reporters, panel members, etc. met, 2) a
repeater station whose antenna received the signals from the studio building
and “bounced” them to the transmission station, and 3) the transmission
facility atop Fortin Hill, which broadcast the programs to the entire state.

By knocking out the transmission
tower facility the government-directed thugs insured that APPO could not
operate the occupied state TV and radio stations. The damage wrought at the
transmission control room was a shocking double admission: 1) the URO
government knew it was unable to retake and hold each of the three components
of its broadcasting stations, and 2) the impact of the APPO broadcasts was an
intolerable threat.

Therefore they destroyed a key
component of what they surely regarded as their own governing infrastructure.

The battle for the air waves
continues. Later that day, August 21, having lost the use of Channel 9 and FM
96.9, APPO groups seized twelve commercial radio stations belonging to nine
different companies. The number of seized stations broadcasting for APPO varies
from time to time. This morning (29 August) we were able to pick up three, one
AM and two FM at our location below the base of Fortin Hill. Apart from radio,
the movement produces and distributes a great deal of printed material, videos,
and CDs, and seeks to spread its point of view by all means of communication.
Radio of course remains particularly important.

On August 16 and 17 a national
forum was held in Oaxaca to discuss “Building
Democracy and Governability in Oaxaca.” Sponsored by fifty organizations
within Oaxacan civil society, as Davies wrote, it
provided “an opportunity to analyze the crisis and propose alternative
solutions from the perspective of civil society, including a new Oaxacan constitution, and by implication, a blueprint for
the nation.” The basic problems that beset Oaxaca
exist throughout Mexico and
so it is not surprising that the invitations to attend brought people from all
parts of Mexico.
What is taking place in Oaxaca
is clearly inspiring people throughout this nation.

In the meantime, the situation in Oaxaca remains full of uncertainty, with much seemingly
dependent on the power struggle centered in Mexico City over the presidency. Those
currently in the saddle are doing everything possible to insure continuance of
PAN/PRI rule, but the majority of Mexicans may be ready for much more
fundamental changes. Education, true education, is indeed subversive. ¡Adelante!